Tag Archives: Friday link roundup

Sometimes your blog editor has a headache for three days and Friday links don’t happen. Hopefully these two great long reads will make up for it!

There’s lots of discussion right now about voter ID laws, gerrymandering, felony exclusions, college student exclusions, and other methods of suppressing the vote. It’s important that we remember that the fight for voting rights in the 1960s wasn’t about getting the constitutional right for black men and women to vote – they had that – but about the creation of federal laws to stop state-level methods of preventing black men and women from exercising that right. William Sturkey’s excellent look at the role of local authorities and laws in suppressing the vote is important for anyone interested in the fight today.

Today in “everything old is new again,” Dierdre Moloney takes us through the 1910 Muslim ban.

This week, the Organization of American Historians is in New Orleans for its annual conference. Rashauna Johnson talks about how the New Orleans cityscape tells historians things about the city’s past that are absent from or obscured in more traditional archives.

Some have said that the movement to bar refugees from U.S. soil is “un-American.” Allen Wells reminds us that it’s very American, actually.

Take The Atlantic’s quiz on women’s history based on their magazine. Your friendly editor didn’t realize she was supposed to read the articles first, so she only got 7/10, but read the articles and do better!

One more thing on the last day of Women’s History Month, a great article about women fighting for the right to travel under their own names, especially when they were married women who had kept their maiden names. Coverture, what a pain, amirite? And by pain, I obviously mean “oppressive system which still structures so much of our lives.”

Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent book Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas In America is on many of our reading lists, invites us to “open the closets of history.”

Historiann gives us some insight into “cork bums” and other aspects of turn of the 19th century fashion.

If you haven’t played with it yet, put your info into The Atlantic’s Life Timeline. One important thing to think about when studying the past is that people’s formative experiences shape how they react to what happens in their lives. For instance, do you have living memory of The Great Depression? Were your teenage years full of official approval of “enhanced interrogation” and episodes of 24? It’s good to think about why people of different generations react differently to the same events, and this sort of thing can help us think along those lines.

In addition to the myth of “black Confederates,” one of the other myths of American slavery that circulates from time to time is that of “Irish slaves.” This article unpacks the myth, its roots, and why it continues to have such currency.

President Trump’s veneration of Andrew Jackson this week provoked outrage, but also raised the issue of how we commemorate presidents who were slaveowners, given that that title applies to most of the presidents we had for the first hundred years of the republic. Shaun King argued that no one who participated in the system should be honored. Nick Sacco argues that we should take a more nuanced view, offering up Ulysses Grant for our consideration.

As agencies like the EPA face cuts, everyone’s looking to the recent past to understand where it came from and what it has done, including The Daily Contextand the Weather Channel, which highlighted some pre-EPA photos from the Documerica Project run by the National Archives.

The National Archives’ Tumblr “Today’s Document” also shared a great set of “evacuation day” photos from the FDR Library. If you don’t follow “Today’s Document,” you should.

There were lots of great pieces published this week about Ben Carson and whether slaves are immigrants (no), but we bet you’ve seen some of those already, so instead, here’s something a little different.

March 8th is International Women’s Day and this year it was also Day Without A Woman. One goal of the organizers was to highlight the labor done by women that is often unpaid and not really recognized as labor until it’s absent. This examination of a 17th century case of sheep-napping is a fascinating look at what historians call the “household economy,” and a good reminder that women didn’t “start” being economically productive in the 1970s.

This piece on the activist Margaret Hinchey also emphasizes the way that immigrant rights, labor rights, and women’s rights have always been connected in America. Hinchey’s question to American men – “Isn’t your sister and your daughter and your wife a person?” – is the same question at the core of Day Without A Woman.

If you’ve ever been to the period rooms at the Met (or even if you haven’t!) you’ll want to read Lucy Ives’ piece about the impulses behind their creation in Lapham’s Quarterly,“Hereditary Forces”.

The Washington Post recently published an article that (yet again) referred to Sally Hemings as Jefferson’s “mistress.” Elizabeth Adetiba, an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, pushes back against both that narrative and the rhetoric of “humanizing” Hemings.

Often undergraduate students in history courses want to work with cartoons from the past. This piece in the Smithsonian shows us just how complex those cartoons are, and helps us navigate a complicated Reconstruction-era cartoon by annotating the image.

Settle in with “The Marked Woman,” an excerpt from the first chapter of David Grann’s forthcoming book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I.

This Friday, we’ve got a couple of great forums to share, as well as an article on a 1980s movement that’s very relevant at the moment.

The African American Intellectual History Society features several great posts in a forum titled “Remembering Malcolm” on the 52nd anniversary of his assassination. If you’ve ever wanted to know more about the life and thought of Malcolm X, but haven’t known where to start, this forum is a great entry point. They also provide a list of further readings.

Over at Sports in American History, they’ve posted a series of pieces on the life and legacy of Muhammad Ali. Start here, with Andrew R. M. Smith’s overview.

Many people are concerned by the recent crackdown on undocumented immigrants and thinking about how they might get involved. You might also be hearing a lot about “sanctuary.” Over at Religion & Politics, Judith McDaniel gives us some history of the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s, an interfaith movement organized in response to the crisis of Central American refugees fleeing to the U.S., as well as the longer history of people seeking “sanctuary” in churches and cities in 19th and 20th century America.

In the past few years, scholars of colonial and early U.S. history have really dug into the idea that slavery drove not only the creation of the U.S. economy but the creation of a worldwide system of capitalism itself. If that’s interesting to you, get a taste (ha) with this examination of “Sugar’s Bitter History”

We often assume that broad availability and acceptance of both birth control and abortion are very recent developments. Lauren McIver Thompson’s piece on birth control in the antebellum period (the term historians use for the part of the 19th century before the Civil War in the 1860s) shows us that there’s a long history of this tension between idolizing motherhood and desperately trying to avoid it.

ETA Part 2: This interesting post on Sacco and Vanzetti from an undergraduate at Utica College, who is blogging on free speech issues as part of a course on Civil Liberties taught by Dan Tagliarina, friend of The Daily Context.

We hope there’s something here that piques your interest. More context coming up next week! As usual, get in touch with us if you’d like to write something, or if there’s something happening in the news for which you’d like a little historical context.

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